How Everyone In Netflix’s The Devil All The Time Is Connected

The new Netflix movie The Devil All the Time spans 20 years in the lives of several people living in small towns in southern Ohio and West Virginia. There are two families — the Russells and the Lafertys — a serial killing married couple, and an evil pastor. All of their stories are interconnected, with some characters played by different actors at different points in their life. So, if you need help keeping track of everything you watched in The Devil All the Time, let us lend a helping hand.

The movie is an adaptation of a novel by Donald Ray Pollock, who, in a cool move, is also the narrator of the film. Pollock is from the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, which is one of the settings of the story. But The Devil All the Time tells a very disturbing tale about Knockemstiff and a couple of other nearby towns. All of the main characters are involved in violent and traumatizing situations, involving religion, war, family, death, and fate.

"Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957," Pollack reads at the beginning of the film, "nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance."